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The Maker movement makes its mark

The next industrial revolution is right around the corner, and it's going to be bigger than the internet—or so says a growing army of hackers, designers, artists, and entrepreneurs. Across the country,

The next industrial revolution is right around the corner, and it's going to be bigger than the Internet — or so says a growing army of hackers, designers, artists and entrepreneurs.

Across the country, "makerspaces" are popping up to satisfy demand for affordable access to industrial tools and shared work spaces. These massive fabrication facilities are like a cross between a business incubator and a manufacturing plant, with sprinklings of academia and community spirit thrown in for good measure.

"With the right motivation and time on your hands, you can now go through your own personal industrial revolution in 90 days, and can launch a company or product within those 90 days," says Mark Hatch. He's CEO of TechShop, a chain of makerspaces that has eight locations throughout the country and plans to expand globally.

How is this possible? The secret appeal of these places is not simply the low-cost access to powerful tools and studio spaces, but also the community of entrepreneurs, marketers, hired hands and general go-getters who coexist under the same roof. Don't know how to weld? Take a class, learn the basics, build a product and market it — all in the same building.

"The skill level required to produce a usable prototype or usable object has dropped precipitously just in the last five years," Hatch adds.

The catalog of success stories is proof enough: The Square credit card reader, Pebble smartwatch, Coin all-in-one credit card and the MakerBot 3-D printer all came from makerspaces in different parts of the country.

Lesser-known projects include a battery-powered skateboard, a low-cost irrigation system for impoverished farmers, an eyesight-testing device for smartphones, the world's fastest electric motorcycle, and a 3-D printing pen that raised over $2 million on Kickstarter.

At Artisan's Asylum in Somerville, Mass., a team of roboticists are building a giant 10-foot-tall, 18-foot-wide, six-legged vehicular hexapod. Why? Because they can.

But the thing that makes the maker movement a real revolution rather than a passing fad is this confluence of cheap manufacturing, cultural entrepreneurship and simple economics. Collectively, these forces are democratizing innovation.

"Everyone is becoming an entrepreneur," says Molly Rubenstein, education and outreach manager at Artisan's Asylum. "People are moving out of big business and looking for an environment in which they have control over what work looks like — whether that's as a consultant, or as a product developer trying to start a big company."

Hatch notes that most entrepreneurs are able to cut their development costs by 98% through use of a shared space platform. This is why he believes the maker movement will be bigger than the Internet — at least economically.

But it's not just about start-up costs. Innovation itself is getting a makeover. Major corporations, from GE to Ford, are either collaborating with existing makerspaces or building their own to cultivate new ideas.

Universities and government agencies are also getting in on the game, with both Arizona State University and DARPA backing new TechShop locations. Rutgers, Stanford and Georgia Tech have all opened similar facilities, and Harvard recently donated a scanning electron microscope to Artisan's Asylum — a first for the maker community.

"I think companies are looking for entrepreneurial minds," says Rubenstein. "They're looking for people who are creative and innovative and self-motivated. You'll see large companies now looking to open up branches in a ... co-working space, because they want to be around that energy."

And a sense of community is necessary for that energy. As Hatch puts it, "These things are communities on steroids."

Walking around Artisan's Asylum, you'll notice that all the studio spaces are open. There are no walls, very few doors, and no locks — even on personal equipment like computers and bikes. (There are a lot of bikes.)

Rubenstein explains that this is all part of the collaborative ethos driving the maker movement. Starting a business is a scary, challenging endeavor, she says, and a major reason why it's so scary is because you're on your own.

"Creating an environment in which people have the support of a community through the course of that process is partly why the co-working space movement is spreading so dramatically," she adds.

Bill Zimmer, a middle-aged software engineer at the Asylum, says that what's going on in the maker movement would be more familiar to denizens of the year 1900 than any period since, because manufacturing is not only being domesticated — it's being democratized.

"What a lot of folks don't understand is that we have real innovations coming out of these spaces that are worth billions of dollars, that are saving lives and changing the world," says TechShop's Hatch. "And we've only just started."